Rating System

At the coreboot summit 2008 in Denver we talked about a rating system for supported boards. The idea is to make it clear which boards are most highly recommended because the vendors cooperate. Thus the 'Vendor Cooperation Score' rating system was born.

Introduction

To get to such a rating for a particular board, we should establish a list of categories with an associated score. Each fulfilled criteria should be easily verifiable as a yes or no answer.
There should be no subjective elements to the rating system — only measurable criteria should be used to avoid bias or favoritism.

Adding up the scores for the major components on a board (CPU, chipsets, mainboard, others?) would give us a rating that results in a number of 'stars'.

Should we dock a board because it requires soldering or a difficult process for flashing coreboot?

...

As we list boards, we should also make it clear if a board is actually available for purchase. A board might get a high rating, but be unavailable for purchase, in which case it should be carefully marked as such. Board availability will change over a board's lifespan.

Should we provide a separate rating for coreboot support (i.e. the stuff above) and how good our code actually is?

Criteria

When all the criteria have been evaluated, each platform will end up with a total score. To assign "stars" to the platform, we will divide the number of scored points by the number of maximum possible points and multiply that with the number of maximum stars (probably 5) and round down to the nearest half star.

Documentation

Use the following criteria to evaluate each set of documentation:

Points

Description

10

Documentation is freely available and redistributable. It can be downloaded through a direct URL with no click-through pages.

7

Documentation is freely available and redistributable. It can be downloaded on the web after agreeing to a click-through license.

3

Documentation is restricted and only available under Non Disclosure Agreement, however the NDA allows source code written with the documentation to be freely available under the GPL (or another Free Software license).

0

Documentation is not available or the NDA does now allow release of code.

X86 based platforms can have up to 80 points for documentation.

CPU

Evaluate the criteria against the following three sets of documentation (30 total points possible):

Example and support code

Code is freely available under a free software license. It can be downloaded through a direct URL with no click-through pages.

7

Code is freely available under a free software license. It can be downloaded on the web after agreeing to a click-through license.

3

Code is restricted and only available under Non Disclosure Agreement, however the NDA allows source code written using the sample code to be freely available under a free software license.

0

Code is not available or the NDA does now allow release of code.

Adding it all up

The four categories above give us a scale with a maximum of 124 points. If we round that to 125, boards can get a score from zero to five 'hares':

Points

Score

0

1-24

25-49

50-74

75-99

100-125

Example Board

To demonstrate how this will work, we will apply the above criteria to the db800 platform from AMD, which is widely regarded as one of the better supported platforms in coreboot.
(Please fill in this section as new criteria are added).